Israel’s 22-day assault on the Palestinian people in Gaza, starting Dec. 27, 2008, ended when Israel acknowledged defeat – declaring a unilateral ‘ceasefire’ Jan. 17. Israel’s political and military goals were not met and, as in the summer of 2006, when the Lebanese resistance defeated Israel’s military, the Palestinians and their resistance emerged victorious.

Israel’s propaganda machine could not disguise the fact that the assault was meant to crush the Palestinian resistance. Targeting the whole of the Palestinian people, approximately 1350 Palestinians, including over 300 children, were killed in the attacks, with over 5000 more injured. Over half of the injured were women and children.

Millions of people across the world rose in protest against Israel’s massacres and war crimes. The Israelis were left scrambling to defend their atrocities, but were not able to, even with the continued military, diplomatic and political support of the U.S.

The mass Arab and international popular movements united around the world, including hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Americans here, taking to the streets in passionate support for the Palestinian people. The governments of Bolivia and Venezuela cut diplomatic ties with Israel, expelling Israel’s ambassadors from their respective capitals.

The Palestinian Front and Resistance

As analyzed in Fight Back! News Service in February of 2006, Hamas won the majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections of January 2006. Soon after, Israel, the U.S. and the European Union refused to acknowledge the victory and imposed a political blockade on Hamas and its appointed Palestinian Prime Minister, who, according to Palestinian law, was empowered to form a unity government arrangement with elected Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas.

The Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP – Communist Workers and Peasants Party) of Pakistan vehemently condemns the massacre carried out against the Palestinian people by the Zionist State of Israel, in explicit cooperation with US imperialism.

Israel is a racist and colonial settler-State. Given the hostile attitude of the State of Israel towards the Palestinian people for the last 60 years, the people of Palestine have the legitimate moral right to defend themselves against Zionist aggression through armed struggle. The CMKP, therefore, extends full support by all means possible to the Palestinian resistance.

CMKP also condemns the cowardly reaction from the Arab rulers who side with U.S. imperialism and Zionism against the working people of their own countries. The despicable role played by the Hosni Mubarik in keeping the Rafah border crossing closed to the Palestinian refugees and humanitarian aid has increased manifold the miseries of the Palestinian people. The Arab leaders must know that at present, their silence is no less than complicity.

CMKP salutes the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the leadership of Comrade Ahmed Sa’adat in particular, for remaining steadfast in the face of Zionist aggression. CMKP assures Comrade Sa’adat and PFLP that the oppressed people of the world will continue their struggle against U.S. imperialism and Zionism until the world is liberated from oppression.

The actions of the Zionist Entity and the plight of the Palestinian people remind the oppressed people of the world of their grim colonial past and their own suffering under the colonial system. For this reason, the people of the world will forever share a historic bond with the Palestinian struggle. The Palestinian struggle for independence is an international struggle of the oppressed people of the world, with the people of Palestine in the vanguard, against Imperialism and colonial oppression.

I have now received your letter, in which you tell me that you’ve done everything necessary to enable me to stay with you in Sacramento. I’ve also received news that I have been accepted in the department of Civil Engineering in the University of California. I must thank you for everything, my friend. But it’ll strike you as rather odd when I proclaim this news to you — and make no doubt about it, I feel no hesitation at all, in fact I am pretty well positive that I have never seen things so clearly as I do now. No, my friend, I have changed my mind. I won’t follow you to “the land where there is greenery, water and lovely faces” as you wrote. No, I’ll stay here, and I won’t ever leave.

I am really upset that our lives won’t continue to follow the same course, Mustafa. For I can almost hear you reminding me of our vow to go on together, and of the way we used to shout: “We’ll get rich!” But there’s nothing I can do, my friend. Yes, I still remember the day when I stood in the hall of Cairo airport, pressing your hand and staring at the frenzied motor. At that moment everything was rotating in time with the ear-splitting motor, and you stood in front of me, your round face silent.

Your face hadn’t changed from the way it used to be when you were growing up in the Shajiya quarter of Gaza, apart from those slight wrinkes. We grew up together, understanding each other completely and we promised to go on together till the end. But…

“There’s a quarter of an hour left before the plane takes off. Don’t look into space like that. Listen! You’ll go to Kuwait next year, and you’ll save enough from your salary to uproot you from Gaza and transplant you to California. We started off together and we must carry on. . .”

At that moment I was watching your rapidly moving lips. That was always your manner of speaking, without commas or full stops. But in an obscure way I felt that you were not completely happy with your flight. You couldn’t give three good reasons for it. I too suffered from this wrench, but the clearest thought was: why don’t we abandon this Gaza and flee? Why don’t we? Your situation had begun to improve, however. The ministry of Education in Kuwait had given you a contract though it hadn’t given me one. In the trough of misery where I existed you sent me small sums of money. You wanted me to consider them as loans. because you feared that I would feel slighted. You knew my family circumstances in and out; you knew that my meagre salary in the UNRWA schools was inadequate to support my mother, my brother’s widow and her four children.

“Listen carefully. Write to me every day… every hour… every minute! The plane’s just leaving. Farewell! Or rather, till we meet again!”

Your cold lips brushed my cheek, you turned your face away from me towards the plane, and when you looked at me again I could see your tears.

Later the Ministry of Education in Kuwait gave me a contract. There’s no need to repeat to you how my life there went in detail. I always wrote to you about everything. My life there had a gluey, vacuous quality as though I were a small oyster, lost in oppressive loneliness, slowly struggling with a future as dark as the beginning of the night, caught in a rotten routine, a spewed-out combat with time. Everything was hot and sticky. There was a slipperiness to my whole life, it was all a hankering for the end of the month.

In the middle of the year, that year, the Jews bombarded the central district of Sabha and attacked Gaza, our Gaza, with bombs and flame-throwers. That event might have made some change in my routine, but there was nothing for me to take much notice of; I was going to leave. this Gaza behind me and go to California where I would live for myself, my own self which had suffered so long. I hated Gaza and its inhabitants. Everything in the amputated town reminded me of failed pictures painted in grey by a sick man. Yes, I would send my mother and my brother’s widow and her children a meagre sum to help them to live, but I would liberate myself from this last tie too, there in green California, far from the reek of defeat which for seven years had filled my nostrils. The sympathy which bound me to my brother’s children, their mother and mine would never be enough to justify my tragedy in taking this perpendicular dive. It mustn’t drag me any further down than it already had. I must flee!

You know these feelings, Mustafa, because you’ve really experienced them. What is this ill-defined tie we had with Gaza which blunted our enthusiasm for flight? Why didn’t we analyse the matter in such away as to give it a clear meaning? Why didn’t we leave this defeat with its wounds behind us and move on to a brighter future which would give us deeper consolation? Why? We didn’t exactly know.

When I went on holiday in June and assembled all my possessions, longing for the sweet departure, the start towards those little things which give life a nice, bright meaning, I found Gaza just as I had known it, closed like the introverted lining of a rusted snail-shell thrown up by the waves on the sticky, sandy shore by the slaughter-house. This Gaza was more cramped than the mind of a sleeper in the throes of a fearful nightmare, with its narrow streets which had their bulging balconies…this Gaza! But what are the obscure causes that draw a man to his family, his house, his memories, as a spring draws a small flock of mountain goats? I don’t know. All I know is that I went to my mother in our house that morning. When I arrived my late brother’s wife met me there and asked me,weeping, if I would do as her wounded daughter, Nadia, in Gaza hospital wished and visit her that evening. Do you know Nadia, my brother’s beautiful thirteen-year-old daughter?

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine called on January 3, 2008 upon the Arab people and all progressive forces in the world to escalate all forms of resistance against the Zionist and imperialist enemy.

PFLP sources confirmed on January 3, 2009 that in the first hour of the ground invasion of Gaza, Israeli occupation soldiers have already suffered a number of casualties due to the courageous fighting of the resistance forces in Gaza.

The occupation forces began their ground invasion of Gaza on January 3, 2008. The occupation forces entered Gaza in several places at approximately 9 PM, while continuing their shelling and targeting of Palestinians from air and sea, killing and wounding still more of our people while their ground forces prevent ambulances and medical personnel from reaching the victims. All Israeli (and US-made) weapons are being used in this invasion, including massive bombs.

We, communist and workers parties from all parts of the world, strongly condemn the repeated murderous air strikes by the Israeli air force on Gaza which resulted in the killing of over 340 Palestinians. By these brutal attacks and other crimes by the armed forces, the government of Israel try to achieve what was impossible by imposing the wall, the siege and blockade: to break the resistance of the Palestinian people.

The policy of genocide and state terrorism by the Israeli government, supported and endorsed by the powerful imperialist forces in the USA and EU and accepted by some Arab reactionary governments is a new provocation against the peoples and the worldwide solidarity movement.

We call on the workers, women, youth and other sectors, all anti-imperialist and peace loving forces to mobilize against the criminal attacks and policy by the Israeli government, to demand immediate stop and sanctions against Israel. To develop immediate solidarity actions and humanitarian support for the Palestinian people.

Our parties express firm solidarity with the resistance against the aggressions, with the progressive, anti-imperialist and communist forces in Palestine and Israel, with all those fighting for the establishment of an independent State of Palestine within the borders of 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital. Free and independent Palestine!

The Working Group of the international meeting of communist and workers’ parties

December 30, 2008

New signatures

* Workers’ Party of Belgium
* Communist Party of Britain
* Socialist Workers´Party of Croatia
* Unified Communist Party of Georgia
* Communist Party of Israel
* Party of the Communists, Mexico
* Popular Socialist Party of Mexico
* Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
* Communist Party of Turkey

Give me a voice of thunder
That I may hurl implications upon this cannibal
Whose gruesome hunger
Spares neither the mother nor the child

Rabindranath Tagore wrote these verses after the gruesome Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in India in 1919. The massacre of innocent civilians in Gaza is a grim reminder of the colonial brutality that was inflicted on Indians in the times of British India. Same colonial savagery is now being perpetuated in Gaza. So long it has been, but so little has this world changed.

I have always regarded the Palestinians as the most inspirational people in the world. This epic declaration may raise a few eye-brows at first; after all, the Palestinian struggle is perhaps at its most divided stage, with its former leadership (i.e. the PLO) actually colluding with the enemy, the majority of the world and especially Arab governments, watching as silent witnesses to the ensuing massacre of innocent Palestinians. The massacre itself follows 2 years of a brutal siege of Gaza that denied the basic necessities of life to 1.5 million people in one of the world’s most densely populated places, as well as one of its poorest. Nevertheless, I stand by my declaration; who else has faced a foe as formidable, well-armed, disciplined and most importantly, backed unconditionally by the biggest superpower in the world? Who else was colonized precisely at the moment when the era of decolonization began for the rest of the world? Yet, what other national liberation struggle has demonstrated that the right of a people to live with dignity, honour, free from the squalor of refugee camps and the terror of settlers and soldiers is still a desire worth fighting for, better yet, sacrificing entire generations for. This is a tribute to the most heroic struggle of our times, one that has lessons for the entire Third World, i.e. for all us wretched of the earth, to use Fanon`s phrase.

First, a word about the enemy; It is for more than one reason that the United States unconditionally supports Israel. The geo-strategic advantages aside, Israel reminds the USA of its own past, one based on the genocidal expulsion and eventual extinction of the native population. Israel too is a settler colonialism, a pioneering one that seeks to exclude and virtually eliminate the Palestinians as a people. Its ruling ideology, Zionism, is based on establishing the superiority of the settler population vis-à-vis the Arabs. An ideology that has been declared as racist even by the United Nations, it nonetheless forms the basis of the Israeli state. The most important part of this Ideology, however, is its ability to build upon the European guilt stemming from the Holocaust, to always present Israelis as a beleaguered, persecuted people, who have to use force to prevent another holocaust from taking place, even as they themselves perpetrate a holocaust against the Palestinians. Thus, the shamelessness with which the current Israeli establishment was able to justify the massacre of 400 people (and counting) for rocket attacks that have killed a grand total of 1 person in Israel (which itself was a retaliation to Israel`s constant disrespect for the ceasefire). At the same time, Israel continues to expand settlements on Palestinian land, declared illegal by the United Nations, the aim of which is to complete the expulsion of the Palestinians from their lands, that began 60 years ago. If we discount the struggle of the vanished native American peoples against white settler colonialism, no other liberation movement has encountered an adversary like the Palestinians have faced.

Now for the present situation; the roots of the present crisis lie in the Hamas victory in the 2006 elections. While many (including Israel) interpreted it as a proof of the ‘radicalization’ of Palestinian movement, I saw it as proof of the Palestinians commitment to democracy, casting aside a corrupt, ineffectual and compromising leadership for a new one. Hamas showed great political maturity by inviting the much discredited PLO to form a national unity government. Yet, America and Israel were not willing to let this budding democracy from functioning. They had already chosen that they wanted to negotiate only with their stooge, i.e. the PLO under Abbas. Thus, Israel refused to accept the results of the elections, broke the coalition government, armed the PLO’s goon Ahmad Dahlan to take over Gaza. When Hamas retaliated, and recaptured Gaza with the help of its people, Israel began a plan to literally starve 1.5 million people into submission with a siege. It is the failure of all these plans to break the Hamas, which now expresses the will of the Palestinian people, that has led to the latest assault.

This brings me to the final point I wish to make. The Palestinian cause is not one that can be expressed in any millenarian religious ideology. It is not a cause of Muslims, it is a cause of all the oppressed people of the world and it contains valuable lessons for all of us. Apart from the more abstract notions of freedom, liberty, the right of a people to their land, the Palestinian cause tells us something more concrete about the post-colonial experience; the continued presence of American Imperialism in shaping our lives, the will of the people hardly finding expression in the conduct of their representatives, the denial of democracy through corrupt, dictatorial regimes, whose route to power comes via Washington. What we need to learn from the Palestinian people, however, is the need to struggle against the formidable foe, armed to the teeth, against men, women and children armed with stones. Today, as Israel mounts a horrendous attack on the Palestinians, one that threatens to eliminate them, we need to stand by the resistance movement, not only for their sake, but for our very own. Eqbal Ahmad once explained why the Palestinian cause stirs the emotions of people around the world by showing how it touches us on a primordial level. “Our painful colonial past, neo-colonial present and the dangerous perspective of our future, all converge on the question of Palestine” he said. It is for this reason that we must stand by the Gazans, for if Gaza falls, it will take with it many of the dreams that have inspired, even sustained many of us in the Third World; Gaza must not fall!